We are very proud of our gay travel blogging community. It’s quite a diverse family with some of the most talented and kind hearted people we’ve ever met.

The trans side of our LGBTQ family is quite underrepresented, so it was with great delight when we came across Aaron Edwards, a FTM trans traveller, blogging about his travels with his girlfriend. Continuing on from our trans gay stories with ladyboy Regina from Bangkok and trans man Finn from Berlin, Aaron gave us this interview of what it’s like travelling as a trans man.

Hey there Aaron, introduce yourself!

Hi boys, my name is Aaron and I am originally from Chicago, USA. I am a transman and have been with my girlfriend Emily for over 3 years. We met in a gender inclusive/co-ed honours fraternity on campus at Illinois State University. My roommate and I invited her over to hang out and play card games, and since then she has never really left. We’ve been together for over 3 years and have been having a great time together!

Emily and I recently moved to Ukraine temporarily for work and decided that this was a great time for us to finally start a blog to document all our stories.

How do you identify when travelling?

I am male and have changed my passport to reflect this. In the States it takes a lot of time, energy, and hoop jumping but you can change your sex on your driving license and passport. After a certain point in your transition, it looks more strange if you keep the old gender marker that doesn’t look anything like you.

Thankfully at airports I’ve never had any major issues, other than confusion with my syringes and needles for my injectable medication – they always sets off the metal detector, but other than a bit of delay caused by this, I’ve had no issues.

Jennifer McCreath has a fear of flying of a different sort: a fear she won’t be allowed on board. McCreath, a 43-year-old transgender woman in St. John’s, N.L., takes issue with a federal regulation that prohibits airlines from transporting anyone who “does not appear to be of the gender indicated on the identification presented.”

Doing away with the regulation is a cause the federal NDP has been pushing for five years, and one for which Justin Trudeau expressed support before becoming prime minister. It’s also one the federal Liberal government should be all over, given its self-proclaimed reputation as the party of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, McCreath said in an interview Wednesday.

“It all comes back to the notion of equality,” said McCreath, who described having to wait for two hours in a holding area before a flight to the United States in 2011, when she was in the process of changing the gender on her birth certificate. The Canadian regulation, she said, gives officials too much power in cases where someone doesn’t look like the gender indicated on their identification.

My partner and I are avid travelers. As queer residents of New York City, we also often play tour guide for visiting family and friends when we’re not on the road. We encourage our guests to experience New York City beyond selfies in Times Square, including everything from outdoor movies on the historic Intrepid aircraft carrier, to New York Philharmonic concerts in the park, to food festivals in Brooklyn where you can enjoy a ramen burger and craft beer while viewing the Manhattan skyline. We also recommend that our queer visitors pay homage to and get wild at some of the longest standing LGBTQ bars that have played an important role in serving our community, such as Stonewall, the site of the Stonewall Riots that sparked the modern LGBTQ rights movement in the U.S., and Henrietta Hudson, the oldest brick and mortar queer women’s bar in New York City. We are also acutely aware that tourist guides fail to educate our visitors about the rich, diverse LGBTQ culture that exists beyond the bar scene, such as Voguing Balls and the largest LGBTQ fashion shows hosted at world renowned museums.

When my partner and I travel, we try to curate the same type of off-the-beaten-path experiences that we provide our guests. Whether we’re cliff diving in Georgia O’Keeffe country at Abiquiu Lake, or dancing the night away at an underground queer party in Sarajevo, our goal is to immerse ourselves in the most unique ― but also LGBTQ friendly ― adventures that vacation destinations have to offer.

However, the most popular destination guidebooks tend to showcase “must see” tourist landmarks, and any sections dedicated to the LGBTQ traveler generally focuses on the experiences of white cis gay men. If you don’t know someone who is willing to play tour guide like my partner and I do for guests, you really have to reach into the depths of the internet to find guides that feature unique experiences beyond what the mass market is demanding. Travel websites can be a great resource for creating itineraries based on feedback from like-minded travelers because self-published travel bloggers no longer need mainstream publishers to disseminate their words and images to a large audience. Yet, becoming a successful travel blogger is not easy or cheap, unless you’re independently wealthy. In order to travel and create quality, original content, bloggers need financial backing for cameras, flights, hotels, food, event tickets, and more.

The Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau has rolled out what it says is the world’s first travel marketing campaign to feature transgender models. The three models will be used in campaigns directed to both mainstream and LGBTQ media outlets.

The campaign, which also features straight, gay and lesbian models, marks the destination’s latest outreach to the LGBTQ community and is designed to bolster its image as an authentic, diverse and inclusive brand.

The campaign premiered in New York’s Times Square on New Year’s Eve with a billboard video featuring Isabella Santiago, a Venezuelan model and 2014 Miss World Transgender. Viewed by millions, the video was part of the backdrop to city’s New Year’s Eve ball drop.

A word that used to be used negatively, but now reclaimed by us to form one of the letters in our LGBTQIA umbrella – a word to describe individuals who challenge both gender and sexuality, who see gender identity & sexual orientation as overlapping and interconnected.

We met Finn Ballard during our adventures discovering the gay bars of Berlin in Germany who did exactly that. We thought he was just another one of the many gay Bear-liners, until he “came out” to us as a female to male trans. Finn identifies himself as Queer.

After meeting our male to female trans friend Regina in Bangkok, we were dead excited to feature Finn’s story right here in his exclusive interview with trans female to male.

Sherry Donegan of Fresno, Calif., had never taken a cruise before when she joined 17 others last month aboard the Royal Caribbean Brilliance of the Seas for a six-day vacation. But a comment from an anti-LGBT employee aboard the ship and being relegated to the back of a ballroom certainly didn’t make a good first impression.

Donegan is transgender, and her group consisted of trans women, men, and allies. On her second night, a bartender turned her away, telling her, “We don’t serve fags here,” she told the Bay Area Reporter.

Donegan filed a complaint aboard ship and two days later was told that employee had been fired and put off the ship in Mexico. She told the Reporter she doesn’t believe Royal Caribbean, which recently scored a perfect 100 on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index for the second year in a row.

Irpinia contradicts everything you expect about Southern Italy. The rainy climate and green mountains have more in common with the Pacific Northwest than the Amalfi Coast, just 40 miles away. Instead of Roman ruins like those at Pompeii, stones remain from the Osci, the native Campanian tribe known for their salacious festivals. The spiritual center of the region is the famously hard-to-reach church at Montevergine.

Pilgrims arrive after long bus rides over highways that span seemingly bottomless gorges. Irpinia’s landscape is foreboding, which is why the Montevergine pilgrimage has always required strong and focused devotion. The thin air is hard to breathe. The damp stone from the mountain’s peaks perfume the air with ancient minerals.

In the cleared piazza, old women sell candles and chestnuts, but the attention belongs to the crowds of dancing men and women beating tambourines and clapping out ancient rhythms with castanets. If you took away the down coats and wool hats, the scene would look like it inspired one of the ancient mosaics on display at the archaeological museum in nearby Naples.

Energy builds among the devotees who pray and sing as the faithful have done here since the thirteenth century. But on February 2nd devotees wear lipstick and stubble and feather boas. By the time night descends, over two thousand gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender pilgrims will have passed through this Catholic shrine to worship the icon they call the ‘Madonna of Transformation.’